Posted
by
timothyon Thursday May 08, 2014 @04:38PM
from the cool-model dept.

Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes "Epic Games is rebooting Unreal Tournament, but not in a typical way. A small team of veteran developers will begin work on the next edition of the popular, multi-player shooter, in collaboration with pretty much anyone who wants to participate. "From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers. We'll be using forums for discussion, and Twitch streams for regular updates," reads a note on the company's blog. All code and content will appear on GitHub, and development will focus on Mac, Linux, and Windows. What's the catch? According to Epic, it'll take months to forge a playable game. "When the game is playable, it will be free. Not free to play, just free," the blog adds. "We'll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic. That's how we plan to pay for the game.""

Ease of use? Installing mods in previous games (UT99, UT2004 and UT3), while not particularly difficult for the tech-savvy, isn't exactly user-friendly, and when you mess up there's little information on how to fix it.

As for "why would you sell it on Epic's marketplace instead of on your own?", that's almost definitely going to be what most gamers will be using, so that's where all the customers are. I certainly wouldn't mind selling maps for a dollar a pop.

The Umod package format was designed for ease, but since most people play pirated copies that never installed it properly (umod extension setup happens at install time) there was often complaints about that (and less about not being able to use umods on Linux or Mac platforms which is a valid issue, but definitely the minority.)...

Some people want to make a profit, some don't. It gives the people who want to make a few dollars of their model get paid, and lets those who just want to make something offer theirs free. See https://www.assetstore.unity3d... [unity3d.com] for an example of this now. If you don't have all the skills to make a game, you can still make money off of selling assets.

"All code" doesn't mean a subset of the code. It means "all code". Anyhow, if one has the game code and the art assets, then there's nothing to stop you from replacing the assets in the game. If there's some DRM-encumbered binary blob for talking to the store, there'd be nothing stopping someone from coding their own replacement that points to another store.

Personally, from the tone of the announcement, I'd expect something like Google's app market. The official market would be the default, but there's not

I can't get to Polygon from here, so I read the entry on the Unreal Engine blog/wiki prior to my previous post. The game code doesn't look like it'll be under some kind of copyleft, but it *does* look like access to the data will be cheap ($19/seat/month and 5% of income from games based on the engine). In the EULA [unrealengine.com] (which appears to govern licensee actions with the engine and UT Project game assets), I don't see anything stopping a developer from making a modified version of the main game executable and dis

Source says this:"All code and content will be available live to UE4 developers on GitHub"

I.e. you can view the code if you are an UE4-licensee. Just like how the UE4 code is on GitHub, available to UE4-licensees.It will not be "free software" for free as in freedom/libre. I will only be "open source" for a very weird, non-OSI-approved definition of the term.

I'm going to repeat what the other Anonymous Coward above said: "nobody said free to compile and use". TFA says that the code is available to UE4 devs. I.e. people who pay the subscription money for an UE4 license.

But Quake 3 clones like that tend to be less fun, less optimized versions of the real thing. May look too dark or something, sound effects worse, maps worse, runs slow on old PC, inequal quality, unfinished game, lack of players and even sometimes the little issue that people installing the game from distro's package manager will have an older version.

I'll have to try Xonotic 0.7, expecting it to barely run on open source driver, I expect to have to set the keyboard to qwerty before launching it so I can ac

When I first heard this earlier today what came to mind is Minecraft.If they can create a good stable base product with good enough <Insert developer jargon for "information people need to develop mods" here> support then there very well may be a market for good mod packs.I know I would have been more than happy to pay $20 or $30 for Feed The Beast for MineCraft.If they can turn that into a market where they skim some money off the top from the mod pack sellers to pay for a free base product (the oppo

Think of it this way... Sure you *can* use the Amazon App Store on your Android Phone, and even get some Android Apps cheaper than you would on Google Play, however you would need to seek it out and install it yourself versus just using the one that is pre-loaded on your phone.

As such, using the Unreal Store will create immediate visibility to all users, as well as put the onus of distributing and more importantly tracking patch levels and updating the content on Epic instead of the user.

For the user the game will be free as in beer, not "freemium" with in-game micro transactions. The code will neither be free as in beer nor free as in speech, but if you are already a UE4 subscriber ($19/month) you can use and extend the code for no extra charge, presumably under the same license and terms as mods to the engine itself so basically it's a reference implementation FPS. If you sell anything you owe them 5% of the gross revenue, if you give it away you owe them nothing. Which makes their pricin

More importantly, since they want a royalty payment on sales, why are they charging developers per month up-front? Wouldn't this reduce the number of developers willing to experiment with their engine?

The $20/month is the fee for continuing updates to the Unreal Engine 4, that cost won't impact UT4 in any way except that I believe modders would nee to licence the Unreal Engine 4 to create mods for UT4

Consider that there are few games for Linux and there were even fewer at that time. It probably is a bit of a hyperbole (and I don't think there is any problem with that), but I can see how someone would have their heart broken over that. Maybe they use only Linux normally, so it means they cannot even play?

Right there with you. That was the last regular FPS I played. Quick, fast, brutal action. One of my favorite games of all time. And having it on Linux meant I actually played it, rather than just have it sit on a shelf. All they needed to do was slightly improve on the UT2K4 concept.

He bought / stole the account, and he's been spouting a lot of bullshit lately.

And you're spouting a little right now!;-)

Suggesting this acct was stolen is just a patent falsehood. The original owner of this acct sold it for $100 in a very well publicized Ebay auction. I happened to win the auction and I felt at the time that a piece of Slashdot history (a beta account -- 2digit already) was well worth the money out of sheer novelty. A 3digit acct later sold for around $700 and another for $200-300, from what I could tell.

Love or hate the low-uid, you have to admire any piece of Slashdot history. CmdrTaco is probably the only person posting with a lower UID than me and he's not posted here in a long time (2011). I donated quite a bit of time to helping CmdrTaco on a revamp of the moderation system over several emails back and forth, and he was appreciative of my feedback. I'm a programmer and system designer so he didn't just outright reject what was said. There was a small think-tank of us working on it. But shortly after that Slashdot was sold and the changes were never implemented.

Come on man. I enjoy Slashdot. I've posted my wacky opinion here for quite a long time. My other acct was 6 digit. The one before that was a 4-digit low to mid 2000s uid. I've since lost access to both of those. A good friend was very involved with this site early on and tried to get us all into it back on the TWCTF mailing list back in the day.

I said "He bought / stole the account". According to your own story, I was correct. It is not a "patent falsehood" as you claimed. The truth is your account UID is NOT an indicator of how long you've been on Slashdot, or an indicator of any experience, knowledge, etc. in anything tech-related.It IS an indicator that you prefer to masquerade and misrepresent yourself. Your recent posting history is absolute proof that you enjoy spouting bullshit.

When I first started posting from this acct I acquired about 25-40 new cyber stalkers, and each loooooved the ad hominem attack because it is a cheap way to smear someone and try to ruin someone's day. They would reply after everything I said that I bought the acct on Ebay... just to warn everyone that I

Also, GitHub/doesn't/ require you to pick an open source license for public repositories. You can choose whatever the hell damn license you want.The only thing you do by accepting the GitHub terms of service is grant some rights, namely that everyone can see and fork your repository (which might qualify as "open source" in your book, but I view as a cop-out). Of course, this still doesn't give anyone the rights to actually do anything with the code besides looking at it.

If it's open it's not going to have any damn DRM, that's half the point of it being open source.

It can be open source, but still have licensed technology. For instance Shake's source code was available for I believe $100,000. But you couldn't distribute the code nor use any of the patented technology contained within.

If you license the Unreal 4 engine you get the source code. But you still have to pay to distribute your game based on that source code.

Whether you pay or not, you're licensing the source. So it's both open and restricted in what you can do with the code. Similarly Epic can both gives you the source code to Unreal Tournament and restrict how you use it.

They seem to have taken a leaf from Valve's book with Team Fortress 2, but are taking it a step further by opening the development itself. If this works out well, it could have a lot of ramifications for the future of game development. I'll be happy enough as long as the lightning gun comes back. That thing made headshots so much more fun.

Man, I saw that in action just last weekend. A buddy had a retro-game LAN party in place of a bachelor party. Good times.

If they were going to bring it back, I'd suggest adding the family pet as a dynamic object that generally tears the shit out of you. Or the occupants of the house going about their business. "I'm sniping behind timmy's left ear" "Lookout, Dad is coming into the kitchen and he's full of rocket whores!" "Player 3 chewed like a cheap plastic toy"

Bring back the GIANT MAPS. I'm jonesin' to play in the giant bathroom again.

Yes! These maps were great! I used to hide out in a drain in the sink (there was a redeemer hidden in there) or take a sniper position on top a piece of crown molding. 2 inches high in a kitchen with a super shock rifle? and the TV actually worked!

I would love nothing more than re-creating the feel of that game with a few modern updates (maybe modern, smoother graphics for better eye-candy, destructible map elements (leave a crater where a redeemer went off, drop a wall on an enemy), rockets that actually fly fast like real rockets, blast waves, simulated vertigo/shock on impact, more useable gadgets in maps).

just upgrade UT2k4 with the things that have become standard in the last 10 years.....

actually fuck that, FPS has only gotten worse over the last decade, re-release with only the most minor tweaks to take advantage of modern hardware and improve the map and mod cache a bit (really just upgrade so hash collisions can't happen and add a browser function to delete only specific cached data when the cache grows to over 9000)

Even though the UT series were great games in their own right, in reality their purpose have always been to serve as tech demos for the latest iteration of the Unreal Engine. The full UT3 source code is also available to UE3 subscribers as an example of how to implement a game using the engine.

However there hasn't really been any significant changes to UE3 in the last couple of years while they were ramping up development on UE4, so there wasn't much need for another UT game. Now that UE4 is ready to go

DOATA2 and League of Legends are were it is at now for competition. Before that Starcraft 2. Before that CS. Team Fortress 2.

Making UT open isn't going to change anything, the world has long since moved on to bigger and better things.

If you want to bring something back that is relevant, bring back Enemy Territory with an open update. Now that would be awesome. Though much of the reason it was great, were features that have since been integrated into all FPS now,

You don't seem to get it, you're already paying the subscription to use the engine, subscribers just get access to the source code of the game where they can make changes and whatnot. Totally different.